The waiting game

Commuters crane their necks over the edge of curbs at bus stops or on train platforms, wondering when their ride will come.

Many factors--accidents, mechanical breakdowns, waiting for track signals--account for why printed transit schedules and actual operations often are minutes and miles apart. Satellite technology may soon ride to the rescue, helping to eliminate some of the suspense in transit mystery trips. It might even prevent the knots that occur when buses become bunched together on one part of a route. The CTA plans to unveil this summer a next-bus countdown system on the No. 20 Madison bus route.

In late June or early July, CTA No. 20 Madison customers will be able to use their computers and wireless hand-held devices that access the Internet to track the real-time locations of buses and get the estimated time until the next bus reaches a selected bus stop.

It also will give the estimated arrival time of the bus directly behind the one coming on the 10-mile-long Madison route, where scheduled intervals between buses range from about four minutes during rush hours to up to 20 minutes at night.

Riders can sign up to receive pop-up alerts on their computers or other devices when a bus is a designated number of minutes from arriving at a selected stop. So riders can stay in their office or home until the bus approaches.

One electronic sign providing next-bus information also will be posted for testing at a busy bus stop west of downtown, officials said.

Text messaging of bus information to cell phones, pagers and other devices would be phased in later. Real-time information also would be available to phone operators assisting customers at the Regional Transportation Authority's travel information center.

A separate rail program designed to accurately count down the arrival of the next train for passengers waiting on platforms has been mired in reliability problems during five years of testing, often incorrectly reporting the number of minutes that the next train would arrive.

A replacement train-tracking system will be undergoing tests through at least the end of the year, officials said.

The next-train testing is taking place at the CTA rail stations at O'Hare, Midway, Cumberland Avenue on the O'Hare branch of the Blue Line and Davis Street on the Purple Line in downtown Evanston.

Once the kinks are worked out of the $3 million pilot project, the data-communications system could be expanded in the future to tell commuters who drive to CTA or Metra park-and-ride stations whether parking spaces are available before they leave home, officials said.

"Our long-term goal is to put together a regional system that gives real travel times to riders connecting between the CTA, Metra and Pace," said Duana Love, manager of oversight and technology development at the RTA.

The CTA bus-tracking system is designed to spot the locations of the agency's 2,000 buses, which are equipped with global-positioning system devices, and provide updates of each vehicle's position every 15 seconds, said John Flynn, CTA vice president of technology management. If the experiment generates reliable data during testing throughout 2006, the system would be expanded over years to the CTA's 150 other bus routes on more than 2,200 route miles, officials said.

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1 million served

One million of the 1.5 million rides that the CTA provides each weekday are on buses. Two-thirds of the CTA's bus routes travel through the downtown.

Work on the $1.3 million bus pilot project began in 2002. CTA officials estimate it would cost at least $25 million to expand the next-bus system to all routes.